No feature of the “Gunnery” life is more interesting to the old scholar or to outsiders than the ingenious and effective punishments invented by Mr. Gunn for the less serious and still important offenses inevitable in such a community. He made early application of the principles so earnestly defended in Herbert Spencer’s “Education” and contrived to “make the punishment fit the crime” in a manner worthy of W. S. Gilbert’s famous “Mikado.” His memorialist, enlarging on this phase of the “Gunnery” life, thus enumerates “the grotesque punishments which Mr. Gunn visited on petty offenses in his school and family”: “A boy of uncommon diffidence might be sent to call on some village spinster or, worse yet for the blushing youngster, on some comely village lass. A youth too boisterous would be dismissed for a four-mile walk, ordered to hold a chip in his mouth for an hour, or to run a dozen times around the church on the Green, sounding the tin dinner-horn at each corner in rotation. Two small boys caught fighting were often ordered to sit, one in the other’s lap, taking turns thus for an hour or two. Pounding a log with a heavy club was a favorite panacea for superfluous energy in the family sitting-room. Once a mischievous youngster was seen sprinkling a dog’s face with water at the tank behind the Gunnery. The master, who had a tender spot in his heart for animals, stole up behind the offender and ducked him liberally, to give him, as he said afterward, an inkling of the feelings of the dog. At the Gunnery it used to be a custom to allow a boy to take the anniversary of his birth as a holiday, and a too clever lad was detected by Mr. Gunn celebrating thus his third birthday within a single year. The next genuine anniversary of the boy’s birth came on a Saturday, which the recusant celebrated by hugging a tree for several hours while his schoolmates enjoyed the regular school holiday. A resident of Washington tells how, years ago, he found at the fork of two roads and hugging a sign-post in anything but sentimental fashion a youth whose only reply to questions was, ‘I’m a poor miserable sinner,’ that being the formula of penance which the master had prescribed. A dozen lads some twenty years ago were caught raiding the bough-apple trees of the neighbors. Mr. Gunn made them draw up a formal address of apology, bear it in procession to each of the amazed owners of the trees, read it on their knees, and pray forgiveness. A single truant once caught committing the same offense in the orchard of a poor widow was sent to work all day picking up stones in one of her fields.